🌕 HOMESCHOOL SCIENCE: Lunar Samples for Your Local Library

July is our special Moon Month each year in the River Houses because July 20th is the anniversary of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. If you’re on good terms with your local library (and we hope you are!), there’s a notable lunar education program that you and your library friends could make available to your community with a bit of coordinated effort: an actual collection of moon rock samples brought back to earth by the Apollo astronauts.

This is not a homeschool program specifically — in fact, it’s a rather tightly controlled NASA education program that is open only to paid employees of educational institutions who attend a special training program at a NASA site. But professional librarians do qualify, and if the program catches your imagination you might consider working with your local library to make it into a special community education activity.

The lunar sample program and the application process are fairly elaborate — they’re outlined on NASA’s educational materials website:

• ➢ NASA Lunar & Meteorite Sample Disk Program (K–12) (nasa.gov)

If homeschoolers were to collaborate with their local library they might not only be able to bring this distinctive educational opportunity to their community, but they might also generate some favorable publicity for all concerned. (“Moon Rocks Coming to Town,” the local headlines will declare.)

Here’s a NASA video that describes the sources of the samples, the sample program, and the procedures involved in requesting and storing the borrowed materials.

This isn’t a simple weekend project — you’d have to work on it in association with a local library over a period of several months. But it’s an exceptional opportunity to bring genuine samples from an alien world right into your students’ hands. That makes it worth exploring. 🚀

What educational discoveries (terrestrial or extraterrestrial) have you and your students been making in your favorite library this Hercules Term? 😊

❡ Explore more: For a host of little homeschool lunar lessons, turn to chapter 4 in your recommended backyard night-sky guide. 🌕

❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 📖

❡ When in doubt, go to the library: This is one of our regular Homeschool Books & Libraries posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📫

❡ Homeschool calendars: We have a whole collection of free, printable, educational homeschool calendars and planners available on our main River Houses calendar page. They will help you create a light and easy structure for your homeschool year. Give them a try today! 🗓

❡ Support our work: If you enjoy our educational materials, please support us by starting your regular Amazon shopping from our very own homeschool teaching supplies page. When you click through from our page, any purchase you make earns us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for helping us to keep going and growing! 🛒

❡ Join us! The aim of the River Houses project is to create a network of friendly local homeschool support groups — local chapters that we call “Houses.” Our first at-large chapter, Headwaters House, is now forming and is open to homeschoolers everywhere. Find out how to become one of our founding members on the Headwaters House membership page. 🏡